This is my last post for the NAP. I am looking forward to the continued fun here, especially on Sundays. Thanks, everyone, for reading and commenting and giving me the opportunity to share stuff with you.
In case any of you are wondering what ever became of the fire truck, it was rescued from the NJ turnpike truck repair shop (where it last broke down) on Friday and is poised for the next leg of its journey from Kentucky. The next stop will be a shop in NH to replace the starter and several relays and to overhaul the electrical system. Then it will be ready for its final leg to Boston.
As I was sitting in an awesome talk on circuitbending last week by Peter Edwards
of casperelectronics and thought of a way to enhance the original plan for filling this truck with music instruments and recording equipment to take around to kids. The new part of the idea is to have the truck itself evolve as a musical instrument and have the kids help build things onto it and in it that make music/sounds that happpen when it’s driven. We could also build recording devices to automatically record the sounds and then teach the kids how to choose samples, loop them, and build songs out of the sounds that the truck and its instruments make. We could make organs or attach accelerometers/sensors in various places. I dunno – some of the guys at the Media Lab are really good with this sort of thing, so I’ve proposed to do a brainstorming workshop at an upcoming research conference to see what people might want to come up with. Hopefully, by then the truck will be home safe and sound.
Kelly, thanks for your stint here at nap. Let me know when you want to bring your fire truck to Chapel Hill. I’d love to play with that once its set up.
Ya Chicago too. And may I suggest a corresponding website to uplink kid-created music etcetera etcetera.
aye aye!
aww man, weak to see yr posts end. Thanks for updating us on the fire truck; I needed closure on that story.
Sad to see you go…
thanks everyone…i will still be around – i’m not really going anywhere.
the fire truck broke down again last night, this time roughly 3 miles east of the I-84/I-90 junction. something terrible was going on under the truck – loud and violent rhythmic banging. i’ll see if i can upload the audio somehow.
so now it’s about an hour outside boston at an AAMCO transmission place. they said they’d get to it tomorrow.
no closure yet.
and still no end to the $$ hemorrhage.
technically it’s still justin’s truck, but it’s my drive shaft and fuel injection system.